death house
4
9.8
- noun
- /dɛθ haʊs/
- NSFW
:
cárcel de muerte
- That's a one-way ticket to the death house.
- go to the death house
- call it 'the death house'
Examples
-
The family gathered outside the death house to protest the upcoming execution.
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But not as bad as sitting in that death house.
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What about all those people he put in the death house?
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I'm coming to see you in the death house, Michael.
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One of the escapees was scheduled for a transfer to the death house at Sing Sing.
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When you did that interview with Earl Williams in the death house, our circulation went up 75,000.
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When I had cried myself out and we were both shivering violently, it was time to leave the death house.
Fiction book (1999) -
The condemned prisoner spent his last days in the death house before his execution.
-
In the death house, inmates are kept isolated as they await their fate.
Synonyms
97
5.7
A part of a prison where people who will be executed wait
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is compositionally built from 'death' + 'house', so learners can infer it denotes a place associated with death; however, the specific institutional meaning (a prison section where condemned prisoners are held) is specialized and not directly predictable from the constituents. Because 'house' commonly denotes a dwelling and the legal/prison sense is a narrower, culture-specific extension, an average B1 learner who knows the words may guess a general 'place of death' but not the precise prison-related meaning.
Etymology
Death house comes from the plain image of a house for death: a special building or section where prisoners sentenced to die were kept. These prisoners stayed there while they waited 'to be executed', so death house now means the part of a prison for those prisoners.